The Nightingale of Périgord

Esthela Solano-Suarez (ECF, Paris)

On the night of the summer solstice of June 1969, in response to an auditory command, François Augiérasi was to set light to a “circle of fire”, a sign addressed to Heaven. Following a long climb carrying cans of inflammable liquid; he managed to reach the summit of a promontory where he traced a circle forty meters in diameter. He was just about to strike a match for the sign to appear, when a nightingale sang. Without room for doubt, yet another sign from the God of the Universe.

This circle of fire and the light shining under the stars on a Périgord night, signals the fulfilment of his destiny. There was produced for him the experience of a “wild happiness”, arising from the feminine part of his soul. By allowing himself to be impregnated by the force of the sky and the stars he would engender a new race of men, The True Man of the Divine Plan.

François Augiéras, like a Schreber of the Périgord, bears witness in his writings to a life of bitterness and extreme solitude, allowing us to observe the torments of an existence when the mystery of the speaking being is reduced to being merely a heap of flesh overwhelmed by a chaotic jouissance outside meaning. We can thus grasp that when the knotting of real, imaginary and symbolic comes undone at an early stage, from the beginning of a life, this leaves the speaking being abandoned, prey to an inhumanity and solitude outside discourse. François Augiéras writes in order to survive, without addressing himself to anyone, he writes in order to find some delusional support in the symbolic.

The dissolution of the symbolic inspires in him a return to a state in which “nature” would serve to cleanse us of the errors of civilisation, of Western and Christian civilisation in particular, with the goal of achieving unification with the God of the Universe that shines in the real of the stars in infinite space.

In the course of this mystical and delusional trajectory, Augiéras is realised successively as object of jouissance of an old man, as the star that is missing from the heavenly bodies, finally becoming The Woman that will be impregnated by heaven in order to engender The True New Man.

The reading carried out by Philippe Lacadée guides us through the lurid meanders of space outside time of the real in psychosis.